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People in Soul’s Songpa District wait in line to be tested for COVID-19 on the morning of March 8. (Yonhap News)

The number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea exceeded 340,000 on Tuesday.

The new caseload brings the cumulative total of cases in South Korea to over 5 million — a little over a month since passing the cumulative 1 million mark. This means that one-tenth of South Korea’s population has been infected with the virus at some point.

Meanwhile, the number of patients in critical condition has risen from under 300 to over 1,000 in the last month. The government claims that the healthcare system can cope with as many as 2,500 critical patients — but on the front lines, healthcare professionals are telling a different story.

Statistics for South Korea’s 17 metropolitan cities and provinces Tuesday showed 342,429 new patients had been diagnosed as of midnight Tuesday.

While the rate of increase has slowed to some extent, analysts predicted the peak could be even higher, particularly due to the effects of the so-called “stealth” subvariant of the virus’s Omicron variant.

Previously, the average daily cases per week had been roughly doubling every week since the fourth week of January. For the first week of March, this had slowed somewhat with a 42% increase from the week before.

“The stealth Omicron subvariant could increase the peak by 10%–15% and delay the peak’s arrival by a few days,” predicted Choi Jae-wook, a professor of preventive medicine at Korea University.

The stealth Omicron subvariant (BA.2) is estimated to be around 30% more transmissible than the previous Omicron variant. The detection rate for stealth Omicron last week was 22.9%.

As confirmed cases have risen, so too has the number of patients in critical condition.

According to the Central Disease Control Headquarters (CDCH), the number of critical patients stood at 1,007 as of the end of the day Monday. After peaking at 1,151 late last year, the number had fallen as low as 257 on Feb. 4 — but it has nearly quadrupled in the 32 days since then.

Hospital beds for patients in severe and critical conditions are filling up at an even faster rate.

As of Tuesday, the occupancy rate for hospital beds for severe patients was 59.6% nationally, with 1,640 out of 2,751 available beds in use. The rate was 55.7% for the greater Seoul area, which has many beds available to begin with — but outside of greater Seoul, it was up to 68.8%.

“We could end up with some regions where the critical care bed occupancy rate is over 80%, so we’re focusing our response on allocating by region and increasing quasi-critical care bed operation efficiency,” explained Son Young-rae, head of the social strategy group for the Central Disaster Management Headquarters.

While the South Korean government has said the healthcare system is capable of coping with the current trends in critical cases, healthcare professionals on the front lines are telling a different story.

“Over 90% [of beds] are occupied,” said a nurse at a hospital affiliated with a private university in Seoul.

“Simply making beds and equipment available doesn’t mean those patients will get better,” they added.

“And with nearly all the hospitals blocking off a section of their critical care ward, there isn’t even anywhere for critical patients who don’t have COVID-19 to go.”

Indeed, there has been a growing discrepancy between the number of severe and critical patients counted by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) and the number of patients actually hospitalized in critical care beds since late January, when Omicron became the dominant variant in South Korea.

The KDCA counts patients as being in critical condition if they are unable to breathe on their own, including those on a ventilator or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. As of Tuesday, that number was 1,007.

But the number of people hospitalized in critical care beds was 1,640 — 633 more than the official total. They included some patients whose COVID-19 symptoms had improved but who were judged to require critical care hospitalization due to underlying conditions and other ailments.

By Lim Jae-hee, staff reporter; Park June-yong, staff reporter; Jang Hyeon-eun, staff reporter

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